Waiting

I remember a summer afternoon when I was twelve or so. I lay on my back in the grass and stared up into the branches of a tall elm tree in front of our house.

I might have been taking in the beauty of the filigree of leaves shot through with sunbeams far above me. I might have been relaxing in the peaceful stillness of the one-block street where my family lived. I might have been reveling in the sensation of warm breezes on my skin.

Instead, I was waiting for my life to begin, languishing in adolescent agony with nothing to do that suited the in between of childhood slipping away to make room for unknown adventures ahead.

My adult self smiles affectionately at the melodrama of that young girl so eager to be unleashed on life. I had no idea she would return.

Yet, here I am, in between again. The space I once described as following the period where my previous life stopped short, not yet arrived at the capitol letter jumpstarting whatever is to come.

I imagined this space as a crevice in time. It turned out to be a wide, dry riverbed. Now, after months of cautious trudging across, I dare to look up and see the grassy bank where I may say, "I'm moving on."

If I can just get past one more patch of trudging, an appropriately melodramatic third act. Surgery that would have sounded like science fiction to the girl under the elm tree.

One section of flesh moved to another, veins and arteries stitched by a filigree of threads shot through with micro light to make the body, we hope, whole once more.

I understand that what felt like agony at twelve is more like tedium at much past sixty. All the same, I am her, waiting for my life to begin.